The hammerhead ribozyme is a small
catalytic RNA that was discovered in 1986, and William Scott began
structural studies on it in 1987 as a graduate student with
Sung-Hou
Kim at Berkeley, and continued to do so with Aaron Klug
(MRC, Cambridge) as a postdoc.
David McKay and coworkers at Stanford published the first
structure in 1994, which was that of a 'minimal' hammerhead RNA
enzyme strand bound to an all-DNA substrate analogue. In 1995,
Scott, Finch and Klug published an all-RNA minimal hammerhead
ribozyme, and subsequently our group has worked on obtaining
pre-catalyticintermediate
and product
structures of the minimal hammerhead.